Valve won't charge for DLC

Valve has told Eurogamer that it has no intention of charging customers who download additional content for games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, despite the widely spread increase of paid-for updates in the PC and console world.

"You buy the product, you get the content," Team Fortress 2 designer Robin Walker told us. "We make more money because more people buy it, not because we try and nickel-and-dime the same customers."

"[In multiplayer games] the content you're playing is being created by the players you're playing against, so the more people that get into the game, the more content you're going to have," Valve's Charlie Brown concurred.

Valve's master plan roughly resembles the traditional PC model, but in recent years services like Xbox Live Marketplace have made charging for extra content a more popular sight.

This has also spread to the PC, where developers such as Oblivion's Bethesda Softworks have begun to charge for additional downloads to their games.

Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi admitted the company had "pretty strong opinions" about how to handle post-release content. "Our philosophy there is, if you buy the product, we put more content out to keep the game interesting, we sell more products."

"Counter-Strike is number one and has been since '99 because we kept the game interesting, not because we tried to charge people more, and that's come back in sales of Counter-Strike," he added.

One thing Valve is doing is toying with the idea of in-game advertising, something it recently revealed would feature in tactical shooter Counter-Strike.

Co-founder Gabe Newell said this was to bring attention to an area that could give smaller teams more options when creating games.

"What I would hope to see is that small developers can give away their titles for free and garner ongoing development support by generating advertising revenue, and we've done all the work to make that possible through the work that we're doing in Counter-Strike," said Newell.

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